Identity and Discernment:
Learning to Ride the Bike of Life
“What other people think and say about you is none of your business. The most destructive thing you would ever do is to believe someone else's opinion of you. You have to stop letting other people's opinions control you.” ― Roy T. Bennett
When I was serving as a seminary intern in a congregation, my supervisor at the time gave me a piece of advice that I have never forgotten. He said, “John, just remember that you are never as terrible as people will say you are, and that you are never as wonderful as people will say you are.” As a priest in community, it is tempting to accept people’s projections as accurate reflections of me. Like most people, I am sensitive to what others think and say about me. But I have found it to be a waste of time and energy to try to manage my self-image to meet what I perceive to be the expectations of others. If we think we will feel secure by controlling how others respond to us, we are setting ourselves up for disappointment.
Coming across this quote from Roy T. Bennett, “What other people think and say about you is none of your business,” brings a sigh of relief. I hear it as an invitation to stop outsourcing my identity to others. I hear it as an invitation to discernment. This doesn’t mean that we no longer care about what other people think. It simply means that trying to manipulate or manage what they think about me is none of my business. It also means that I don’t depend upon them for my sense of identity and security. I am made in God’s image; not theirs. They are made in God’s image; not mine. The sooner we understand this, the quicker we can develop the skill of discernment.
Discernment is the art of listening to the voice of God within us and learning to trust its promptings. It requires time and effort to cultivate intuitive knowledge of God’s will for us. For a variety of often good reasons, we are taught to seek our identity and direction outside of ourselves. We internalize authoritative voices from our family, tribe, and culture. These voices are the training wheels that get us up and going on the bike of life. Eventually, however, the training wheels have to come off, and we must rely upon our intuitive sense of balance to keep moving forward in life.
Learning to ride a bike is one of the earliest skills we learn that gives us a sense of freedom. We can do things we couldn’t do before and go places we couldn’t go before! Discernment is a skill like learning to ride a bike. As we practice it, we grow in our sense of freedom. We are no longer bound by social conventions or external authorities that do not reflect our sense of inner balance. We are free to follow the divine invitations to love that call forth the heart’s deepest desire for identity, meaning, and purpose. We learn to “insource” our identity and direction rather than outsource them, relying on God as the ultimate authority for our lives.
Now, let me be clear that I am not against training wheels! We all need the support of others to grow into authentic spiritual freedom, and this growth is a life-long process. I’m grateful for the many people who support my spiritual growth. The art of discernment includes the feedback of others who know us and love us well, helping us to listen more clearly to our own inner voice. They “hear us” into free speech about the truth of our lives. But they do not and cannot speak for us. They are not responsible for our choices as adults.
This is a great relief to them, too, if they are wise enough to realize it (as any good parent of adult children understands). We don’t serve others well when we keep trying to force them to use our training wheels. And we don’t do ourselves any favors by clinging to the training wheels others have provided long after they have served their purpose. That is a recipe for frustration all around.
This is a truth grounded in my own experience of coming out as a gay man. The training wheels I was given did not support the direction my life was taking as I began to realize my attraction to other men. I had a choice to make: conform to other people’s expectations and the hetero-normative cultural script I was given, or write a new story consistent with my inner sense that God desired me to live and love, fully and freely. I had to discern a new way forward, trusting my inner capacity to keep balanced on the bike of life.
Later, when I worked for a couple of years at Horizons Community Services in Chicago, I read the ground-breaking study Children of Horizons: How Gay and Lesbian Teens are Leading the Way out of the Closet. First published in 1993, it chronicled the experience of queer teens navigating their sense of identity in a culture that frequently rejected and condemned them. One of the most striking findings of the study was the inability of queer kids at that time to imagine their future much beyond attending college or a first job, perhaps also meeting a romantic partner. In other words, they could not project a possible life story beyond a ten year horizon.
Their heterosexual peers, on the other hand, could project a future that included marriage, children, grandchildren and retirement. For them, the training wheels they were given allowed them to imagine a full life (whether or not their lives would conform fully to that script is another matter; at least it provided them with a template to work with and against). For the queer kids, the bike ground to a halt when the training wheels came off. They couldn’t imagine a ready-made future already given to them. They had to discern the way forward themselves.
This was both a curse and a blessing. It allowed for a certain kind of freedom, but that freedom came at a cost. We had to die to the self-image we had internalized and the future projected by our culture, so that we could receive our God-given identity and discern a new path into God’s promised future. What was true for us queer kids is true for all of us; we were just forced to figure it out sooner.
Through contemplative practice, we can choose to receive our identity from God and the freedom that comes with it, rather than being forced by external circumstances. Such freedom is God’s gift to us, but we must be willing to receive it. It is the fruit of prayer, disposing ourselves to God’s will through patient, quiet attention to God in an attitude of loving trust. Discerning God’s will for us is not a game of hide and seek. It is a skill of seeking and finding through releasing our projections onto God and other people, as well as the one’s we have internalized, and turning our attention inward to perceive the heart’s desire.
We already have everything we need to know who we are and what God’s will for us is. We just have to be willing to be stripped of everything else that gets in the way of perceiving it. We have to let go of the training wheels. Then, we can begin to fly.